Backpack turns music into full-body experience for the deaf

I can feel my teeth vibrating. But in a good way. I'm
sitting in a dark room with a series of transducers channelling
some heavy bass through my spine, up to my skull and through my jaw
as well apparently. I'm wearing Subpac, a backpack that behaves like a
subwoofer for your body, translating low frequencies into
vibrations you can feel.

Developed by Toronto-based social venture StudioFeed
and launched in 2013 via Kickstarter, it's now in its next
generation, the M1. And with its minimal design the model
definitely does the job it's intended for -- transforming a piece
of music into a full body experience, as you'd experience it in a
thumping club or when standing too close to the band. StudioFeed
partnership developer James Williams even describes it as
"therapeutic". "It's good for my back," he tells me.

The possibilities for Subpac are pretty
extraordinary. The virtual reality demo created with fashion
designer Gareth Pugh and artist Matthew Stone for Selfridges
-- a spiralling mass of black and white geometric patterns,
unravelling paths and unsettling creatures/people with pointy heads
emerging sporadically from it all -- shows this can enrich an art
installation, a music video or any kind of new design experience
we've not yet fathomed.

It's a conversation starter that everyone will want
to try at a party, says Williams, speaking to me at a demo day held
by Inition, the production company that helped
create the Pugh experience. "You can play 'pass the Subpac',"
Williams responds when I question its attraction in a communal
space. "It's great to try with your own music, it's so much fun.
You become used to that extra element. So now when I listen to
music without it I notice the bass isn't there."

The possibilities for video games are also immense,
particularly when considering how important sound and haptic
feedback are to the VR worlds being engineered by the likes of Playstation for its Morpheus headset.

"The games market is coming to a point where audio
engines are really advanced, they have Dolby integrated. It's
really coming to the fore in video gaming, so this is a good time
for this to come out."

It's easy to setup -- you just plug it into your
system's line in -- so Williams predicts this will continue to be a
huge part of its attraction. Not to mention you won't need to turn
up the music to feel the bass anymore.

But at its heart, what makes Subpac great is the
thrill of the sensation, which is something very human that most of
us can relate to. "At the Sonar Festival, young kids were using it.
And I'm talking six-month-old babies. We just propped them up in
the chair and their eyes lit up -- they loved it. People took them
away screaming and crying. It's such a familiar sensation. You feel
it in the womb. We want to harness that feeling for the everyday.
It's very exciting."

It's also why the Subpac is a natural fit for a
research project currently ongoing with Queen Mary University in
London. The team StudioFeed team has had a huge amount of interest
from those in the deaf community, because of the possibilities it
presents for introducing people to music that may have never
experienced it before.

"Queen Mary is working with us and Union Chapel in
Islington to transcribe the sound of the church organ for Subpac so
deaf worshipers at church so can experience it," explains
Williams.

"Some people have no conception of what music is like
-- your body just doesn't register high and mid frequencies. This
guy in the US, Robbie Wilde, is a deaf DJ. And it sounds
cheesy, but the first time he tried it he cried. He told us 'I've
been waiting for this my whole life'. We're excited to bring it to
as many deaf people as we can."

Queen Mary has just begun trialling it, but the idea
is that during a service the deaf congregation will sit on Subpacs
while the organ is being played and experience it in a similar way
to everyone else.

"When you're in a big abbey and they play an organ,
it has these low frequencies that almost push you back against your
share. It's about being able to harness that."